"
> in Austronesian nations are either rice (in the Western part of the
area) or
> taro and yam (in the Oceanic part of the area). The place of the
origin of these
> crops (at least of the species spread in the relevant zone) is SE
Asia, not the
> Huanghe basin. That's why, IMO, archaeology and ethnography claim
that AN should
> belong to the same cluster (the Austric superfamily) as VietNam-Muong,
> Mon-Khmer, Miao-Yao, Munda and other folks originated from SE Asia
where some
> vegetables and later rice were domesticated.
>
> Indeed, millet is cultivated in some regions of the AN area (Taiwan,
Sumatra)
> but nowhere it is the main crop NOW. Maybe you know facts which show
that the
> situation was different several millenia ago? I'd be grateful if you
share this
> information.
>
>
I couldn't give you any archeological arguments as regard to the AN
peoples. However, it will be evident to anyone familiar with AN
languages of Taiwan that they are much archaic than all other AN
languages, even those of the philipines. Extra-formsan (or PMP, if you
prefer) is but one branch of a sub-branch of AN, and Paiwan is one of
the nearest relative to PMP. This seem to indicate that AN people are
originated from Taiwan.
PMP has several innovations (shared with the AN "substrate" in kam-dai)
that are too rare to have happened independently. The most conspicuous
is the flip-flop in 2pers. pronouns. Paiwan has su- for 2sg, mu- for
2pl (it became nu- as a prefix, but in the genitive form we still have
sun-mun) Tagalog, for instance, has mo for 2sg, indonesian, suffix -mu.
Now, AN people of Taiwan, although they know rice, have millet as their
main crop; just checking my dictionary of Paiwan : they are two words
for rice, one of which is loaned from japanese; the other is paday,
(cognate with malay padi), that designates grains of rice, not the food.
If you just look now the entry for millet, you will find twenty
different words for different species of millet, whether it is cooked
or not etc. In some cases, words for cooked millet can be used also for
cooked rice.
One could argue that AN people in Taiwan, once settled took millet as
their main crop, and thus out of necessity created a varied vocabulary.
A good thing to test this is to look whether the words for millet are
innovated in AN languages in Taiwan or whether they are reconstructible
to PAN. I have to check many dictionaries before I can give a better
answer to this question.
Guillaume